The Phantom of the Opera Resynched (Released)

Hi, this is my first post to the Original Trilogy forum. (Man, I signed this petition long ago but how could I not have checked out this awesome forum?)

Anyway, last winter I made fan edits of the recent “Phantom of the Opera” and “Lord of the Rings” movies that some of you might be interested in. (I’ll talk about the LOTR edit in a different thread.)

One of my biggest gripes with the POTO movie (directed by Joel Schumacher) was the quality of the singing – especially that of the title character. Really, Michael Crawford has no equal in that role! So I synchronized footage from the movie to the original London cast recording. Although I initially considered using a hybrid soundtrack, I ended up using only the cast recording, so there are no sound effects of any kind – just pure singing of the highest caliber. I had to leave out some parts of the recording that I had absolutely no footage for (the reprise of “Notes”, for example, and the rehearsal for Don Juan), occasionally get creative when I didn’t have enough footage for some scenes (or when it was simply impossible to get them to match), and even (daringly and hopefully convincingly) synchronize some words to completely different words spoken by the actors in the movie (most notably at the end of the Masquerade scene, after the Phantom makes his appearance). For the most part, however, I basically had to stretch and speed up segments of the video to match the audio.

In my edit, the chandelier falls at the right time – at the end of the first act! At the end of the Phantom’s reprise of “All I Ask of You”, the camera pans down from the rooftop of the opera house, and I sort of zoom-faded through the walls of the opera house into the theater, where Christine is taking her curtain call (using footage from earlier in the movie), and made the chandelier flicker wildly before having it fall (using footage from later in the movie, of course). After the chandelier strikes the ground, I fade to black, and have the words “six months later” flash on the screen before the Masquerade scene.

I had the most fun with the swordfight scene at the cemetery (and here’s the part that you Star Wars aficianados might be interested in). As some of you may recall, in the stage musical, the Phantom shoots fireballs at Raoul from his skull-topped staff. In the movie, they trivialized that into a much less suspenseful swordfight (in which Raoul actually WINS, heaven forbid!). Having only footage of the swordfight, I made the best of it by rotoscoping the Phantom’s sword into a flaming sword (a la lightsabers) and having fireballs fly out whenever his blade strikes Raoul’s.

Finally, my edit ends where the movie should have ended – with Meg picking up the Phantom’s mask! I zoomed into the mask and fade into a final shot of the Phantom and Christine together (from the “Music of the Night” scene), with a titlecard crediting the voices of Sarah Brightman and Michael Crawford.

The only time I tinkered with the audio (besides seamlessly editing together some disjoint portions of the soundtrack) was relegating a portion of the title song (the portion that was cut from the movie) into the background with added reverb, while I used footage of Meg discovering the mirror-door in Christine’s dressing room.

I would be happy to trade a DVD of my POTO edit for other fan edits or OT preservations. Please PM me to discuss that. And I would be happy to hear your thoughts.

Screenshots to follow. . . .